Oolite Bulletins

Hi!

First, i really love Oolite! It's a great game.
I played the original Elite 20 years ago on my Amiga 500,
and now with Oolite i enjoy playing again.
There is only one thing i miss in Oolite and that are the images
of the different Alien Races in the System Info. Is there an expansion for this?
Until now, i don't find one...

Greetings, Tarycan

Hi and welcome. There is no official expansion from what I know, but it is certainly doable. I once did this as a generic proof of concept, with pictures of inhabitants appearing on the info screen based on the species descriptions, like this:

That's a really cool idea. There's bound to be enough stock monster or alien type pics out there to be able to create this without breaching copyright. The only problem is that I assume they'd need to be individually coded to each system, which for all 8 galaxies is quite a lot of coding, even if some of the mugshots can be reused.

Amaranth wrote:

That's a really cool idea. There's bound to be enough stock monster or alien type pics out there to be able to create this without breaching copyright. The only problem is that I assume they'd need to be individually coded to each system, which for all 8 galaxies is quite a lot of coding, even if some of the mugshots can be reused.

A big chunk of the planets would be "Human colonials", but that's still a lot of pictures to come up with. The ones in whichever version of Elite had them (NES?) were, I assume, procedurally generated out of a bank of face- and body-bits bits, based on the species description (slimy, bony, bug-eyed, yellow, blue, etc.). It could be possible to do the same thing again ...

Amaranth wrote:

The only problem is that I assume they'd need to be individually coded to each system, which for all 8 galaxies is quite a lot of coding, even if some of the mugshots can be reused.

Not really. In the above pic, the image is not hardcoded. I was using regular expressions to read the species string description ("Blue Fat Insects"), looking for the word "insect" inside the description. Finding this word means that the insect picture is shown. This can be very easily modified to chose from an array of pictures based on an array of keywords that can be found in description strings.

Edit: Original discussion can be found here: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7762

another_commander wrote:

Not really. In the above pic, the image is not hardcoded. I was using regular expressions to read the species string description ("Blue Fat Insects"), looking for the word "insect" inside the description. Finding this word means that the insect picture is shown. This can be very easily modified to chose from an array of pictures based on an array of keywords that can be found in description strings.

Would it be possible to vary these at all, so that (say) not every alien of the same genus was based on the same picture? Some insects could be beetles, or mantises, or grasshoppers; some felines could be lions, or house-cats, or leopards; some birds could be flamingoes, or ducks, or toucans, etc.

The game would need to remember which variant was assigned to which planet, but maybe that could be done by e.g. dividing the radius by the population and using the product to pick a type from a list?

Why not use SVG formats? Then you can specify the outline (Insect, avian etc) and then read the colour and use it to generate the XML for that species. All that would need to be created would be the templates for each species.

Some kind of semi-random logic could be used to make sure that the outlines chosen are the same each time for a particular planet.

Disembodied wrote:

The game would need to remember which variant was assigned to which planet, but maybe that could be done by e.g. dividing the radius by the population and using the product to pick a type from a list?

Easier than that - just use the pseudo-RNG which is seeded on system. It's already used to generate most of the system info, so why not a species-picture.

BTW, the pictures were only on later (16-bit) versions of Elite; the 8-bit ones had the 'plain' screens similar to the stock Oolite ones.